We are on Pinterest!

Hello readers! I wanted to let everyone know that we now have a Nashville Vision Therapy Pinterest! Pinterest is a fun and interactive way to collect ideas for projects and interests.  On our Pinterest page you will find some helpful information about Vision Therapy as well as different pins about different vision therapy exercises like tracking and convergence exercises. 

Our Pinterest Page is fairly new so we are still busy adding helpful pins to our boards for you to explore! So if you have a Pinterest Page be sure to follow us so you can stay connected with the Vision Therapy world!  

Here is the link to our Pinterest Page:  www.pinterest.com/opmt

3 Myths about Vision Therapy

Myth: If you have 20/20 eyesight, you have perfect vision.

Fact: When your child does a school screening and passes with visual acuities of 20/20, it does NOT mean they have good vision. The visual acuities have nothing to with how well the eyes function together and how they interpret or process what they see. The eye chart does not measure peripheral vision, depth perception, color perception or eye-hand coordination which is all part of vision. Eyesight and vision are different.

Myth: Vision Therapy is for kids.

Fact: No, vision therapy is for children and adults. Vision therapy is actually more effective for adults because they are usually highly motivated to improve their visual abilities. For adults, it is common to have visual problems with activities up close like reading, using the computer, or writing.  If an adult performs these activities daily and their eyes do not work well together for long periods of time, then it is not uncommon for them to experience eye strain or eye fatigue. 

Myth: If a child has a short attention span and behavior problems, then they most likely have ADD/ADHD.

Fact: Sometimes when a child exhibits behavior such as impulsivity, hyperactivity and distractibility they are diagnosed with ADD/ADHD, but they might actually only have a learning difficulty because their eyes might not be working together and it is hard for them to focus and learn. A child might have a short attention span due to the fact they have a hard time focusing on their work because of a vision problem. According to the website covd.org, “A recent study by researchers at the Children's Eye Center, University of San Diego, uncovered a relationship between a common vision disorder, convergence insufficiency, and ADHD. The study "showed that children with convergence insufficiency are three times as likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than children without the disorder." Before an ADD/ADHD diagnosis is made, please consider getting your child a comprehensive eye exam. 

What other myths have you heard about Vision Therapy? Let us know and we will give you some more facts. 

It is Vision and Learning Month!

August is Vision and Learning Month! Since our children are starting to head back to school, it is important to educate parents and teachers about the link between vision and learning. Some children may struggle with reading or learning and it could be associated with vision problems, but that is often overlooked.

When a parent says, “My child has 20/20 vision, he can not have a vision problem.” That is not true.  The vision screenings that are done at school do not always test for eye coordination and eye movement disorders. With that being said, vision problems are often overlooked because these possible problems could be mistaken for behavior or attention problems.

If a child has a vision problem that goes undetected he or she may struggle with reading and doing their school work.  Some signs that the child may be struggling could be fidgeting, fatigue, headaches, and frustrations in the classroom.

As mentioned above, it is not about just having 20/20 vision. Many other factors go into vision and learning.  Please be aware of this if you notice your child struggling to read and learn. Early diagnosis and treatment is beneficial to help our children succeed. When scheduling your child's back-to-school eye exam choose a doctor that is a developmental optometrist. 

More on blogs that we have done in relation to Vision & Learning here:

Is there correlation between ADD/ADHD and vision problems?

How are Vision and Learning linked?

'My child gets vision screenings at school, isn't that good enough?' 

Teacher Resources

Learning Disabilities Awareness Month 

 

 

 

 

 

Tim Howard- How does he do it?

Tim Howard: goalie for the U.S. Men’s World Cup Soccer Team. In this week's game, he made the most recorded saves in a World Cup Match.

How does he do this? In order for someone like a goalie to block a ball from going into the net, the goalie’s eyes need to work together to converge and focus on one object (the ball).  Having our eyes work together to see a single image is very important especially for learning and everyday life.   You use your eyes everyday to read, throw/hit a ball or look at an object nearby.

If you notice that your child has trouble focusing their eyes, there are simple everyday activities that you and your child could do to improve eye focus and it doesn’t even feel like work! Tossing an object at a target is one of the best training procedures for developing hand/eye coordination and the ability to locate objects in space.

·         Roll a ball back and forth.

·         Throw a ball or bean bags back and forth.

·         Throw a ball into a target like a bucket.

Notice that all these activities are hands on and do not involve technology.  It is important to play with actual toys in real space to improve your eye teaming ability.  This is essential for the development in a young child. Who knows, maybe one day your child will end up playing goalie for the U.S. Men’s Soccer Team making more saves than Tim Howard.

Double Vision in Children

In today's blog we are going to talk about double vision. The most common cause of double vision is that the eyes are misaligned, which then causes two different images to be sent to the brain. Typically, the images are either side by side or overlapping.

When I have a student comes into our office for an assessment, one of my first questions is, "do you ever see two of whatever you are looking at?" And when they say "yes", it is almost like they are wondering, "How on earth did this lady know?"

When I am sitting in the room with just the parents discussing the assessment results and I tell them “your child has double vision,” often those parents feel terrible or guilty for not knowing. I have had parents in my office with tears in their eyes saying, "you must think I am the worst mother."

Of course, these parents aren’t awful at all! Let's break it down; a child is not aware that what they are seeing is abnormal. Therefore, they are unable to communicate their double vision to their parents--children think everyone sees the world as they do. It is not uncommon for parents to be unaware of their child's double vision.

If you suspect your child may have double vision, here are some signs to look out for:

• Reading problems
• Skipping or repeating words
• Overlapping letters when writing 
• Lots of headaches
• Poor depth perception

The good news is, we can treat double vision through vision therapy and/or prism lenses. Since the problem is that the eyes are misaligned we can help alleviate the issue by getting to work on eye teaming exercises.

While hearing your child having double vision is alarming, there are solutions!

Home Therapy Tips

In my last blog post, I referenced the most popular blogs. All were connected on how to make therapy more fun. They are popular because doing therapy the recommended 6 times a week can be challenging and by making it more fun it becomes easier.

I have stated the importance of therapy in a blog post titled "Home Therapy". "Your visual system is working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. With vision therapy we are looking to change the behavior of your visual system and to do that it is all about repetition. That is the key to being successful. Our goal is to make the visual system automated (which means working on it's own without you having to think about it), and the best way to do that is through repetition."

Recently, I read this blog and I want everyone of my parents to read it: Tips for Scheduling Your Child's At-Home Vision Therapy Activities.

What are your thoughts? How can you make Vision Therapy priority?

Happy 2014

Duke is happy it is the New Year too!

Happy New Year!

I would like to start the first blog of the New Year by taking the time and share the top 5 most popular blog posts in 2013.

1. Workin' the Vestibular System
2. Wii Fit
3. Family Game Night
4. Work That Peripheral Vision
5. Treatment Tools

I really enjoyed those blogs, they were very interactive. I'm looking forward to doing more blogs like that this year.

All these blogs have one main thing in common: they involve a lot of hands on activities. If you know me, I am all about hands-on activities! We are becoming a generation where our children's "hands-on" activities are on an iPad.

When children are very young, their visual systems are still developing. Developing children need to interact with objects in real space. It’s how they develop depth perception, eye teaming, tracking and other visual skills.

I am going to say it again- developing children need to interact with objects in real space! Not on a flat screen. Here is an article I found this past December, have been wanting to share. The article is called, "Generation of iPad children who cannot hold a pencil:Playing with touch-screen devices means youngsters are struggling to learn basic motor skills."

I want this generation to be the best, and we as parents need to do whatever we can to keep our children active and creative. Interact with the world! I promise there is a lot to learn.

Concussion Continued

If you have ever experienced a concussion, there are a number of symptoms that relate to the connection between vision function and concussions. These symptoms can include:

• –blurred vision – especially when reading

• –headaches associated with reading

• –double vision

• –eye pain

• –poor reading comprehension

• –light sensitivity

• –frequent loss of place when reading

When having these symptoms, then what?

"For the student athlete, these symptoms can have a huge effect on learning and school performance.  These vision problems can also linger months after the initial pain and headaches associated with the concussion have gone away. The most common causes of these problems are a convergence insufficiency (eyes that don’t work well together at near) and/or accommodative (focusing) insufficiency following the injury.

The good news is that these vision problems respond well to optometric intervention. Treatment usually consists of a combination of glasses for reading and optometric vision therapy.  These treatments allow the student to return to their academic activities much sooner than just waiting for things to clear up on their own."

I also wanted to touch base on a test that can be performed on the sidelines of sports events to make return-to-game decisions. We have heard or seen athletes go back into a game after experiencing a concussion. Long- and short-term effects can be very dangerous.

After a concussion the ability to perform saccadic eye movements (changing gaze) will be impaired. "Saccadic eye movements are very complex and require coordination across a wide network of anatomical structures in the brain. Concussions have immediate impact on the brain’s networking skills. The result is decreased performance on tests of saccadic eye movements, especially subjective procedures that require a verbal response from the athlete.

The King-Devick Test has been used to evaluate the eye movement skills of children, especially those with learning and reading problems. Now, it can be used on the sidelines of sports events to make return-to-game decisions! A decrease in performance from a baseline measurement is a very strong indicator that the athlete has suffered a concussion and should not be allowed to return to the playing field until evaluated by a neurologist."

The King-Devick might look very familiar to most of you that have had your child perform the Perceptual Motor Evaluation here at our office. Take a look at this video:

Please spread the word about the King-Devick Test. It can make a huge difference in a lot of athletes lives. If you or someone you know has recently had a concussion go to your local optometrist and neurologist.

Some of the information was taken from COVD blogs here: 
There's More to Concussions than Meets the Eye
Eye Protect Brain

Concussion

Last week, I blogged about Traumatic Brain Injury. Today, I want to focus on concussions. This is such a hot topic these days. A month ago, PBS Frontline did an investigative piece called, "League of Denial: The NFL's Concussion Crisis." If you haven't seen it, watch the full story here. 

Leading up to that there were numerous articles about concussions:
Wall Street Journal
USA Today
New York Times
Time Magazine
National  Geographic


There are a number of symptoms that relate to the connection between vision function and concussions. These symptoms can include:

• –blurred vision – especially when reading

• –headaches associated with reading

• –double vision

• –eye pain

• –poor reading comprehension

• –light sensitivity

• –frequent loss of place when reading

So once a concussed person experiences these symptoms, then what? I will discuss that in our next blog. I will also discuss a screening test that provides an effective way to detect early signs of concussion. Stay tuned! 

Neuro-Optometric Rehabilitation

Today we are going to talk about neuro-optometric rehabilitation. This is an individualized treatment regime for patients with visual deficits as a direct result of a brain injury. 

Brain injuries can come in many forms:

• Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI)
• Mild Acquired Brain Injury
• Mild Closed Head Injury
• Post-Concussive Syndrome
• Cervical Trauma Syndrome
• Post Traumatic Vision Syndrome
• Stroke
• Cerebral Palsy
• Cerebral Vascular Accident 

The following is a list of symptoms of visual problems which can result from brain injuries:

• Sensitivity to light, glare sensitivity 
• Blurred Vision
• Reading difficulties; words appear to move
• Comprehension difficulty
• Attention and concentration difficulty
• Memory difficulty
• Double vision
• Aching eyes
• Headaches with visual tasks
• Inability to maintain visual contact
• Reduction or loss of visual field
• Difficulties with eye movements, such as:
  1. Ocular pursuits (eye tracking ability)
  2. Saccadics (shifting gaze quickly from one point to the other)
  3. Accommodative inability (focusing)
  4. Binocular vision (eye alignment, eye teaming)
• Visual field loss

These visual problems can be successfully decreased or eliminated with neuro-optometric rehabilitation. The goal of the therapy is to train healthy parts of the brain to perform the work of the damaged part of the brain. Corrective lenses (such as prism lenses) is another treatment to decrease/ eliminate visual problems.

Here at Optometric Physicians, we want to be able to help our patients regain control and independence in everyday living situations.  Those affected by a TBI should first schedule a comprehensive eye exam. Click on this link for some of our success stories. 

Home Therapy

Being part of a vision therapy program is a lot of hard work. I will be the first to admit it. Our program consists of approximately 30 minutes of one-on-one in-office therapy, one to two times a week. On top of that, we recommend 20-30 minutes of home therapy six times per week. 

Getting my patients to do the therapy at home is such a BIG part of their success. Why is it so important?

Simply said, your visual system is working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. With vision therapy we are looking to change the behavior of your visual system and to do that it is all about repetition. That is the key to being successful. Our goal is to make the visual system automated (which means working on it's own without you having to think about it), and the best way to do that is through repetition.

Doing vision therapy at home can be tough, especially when you have to do it six times per week. But as your child learns the skill they're working on, starts to ingrain the skill, and finally begins integrating that skill into a fully functioning visual system, that makes all the hard work SO worth it.

Seeing your vision therapist one or two times a week for in-office therapy is not enough. You will see better and faster results when therapy is also done at home six times a week for 20-30 minutes. Then you can be another success story!

To close, it takes a team. I will do my part, but we need your help too. Parents, together let's help your child!

 I have also written many blogs about different ways to make therapy fun:

How to Make Vision Therapy Home Exercises Fun!

Fun Home Exercises! Continued.... 

Travel Therapy 

Family Game Night! 

Workin' the Vestibular System

Work that Peripheral Vision 

Vision Therapy Masking Tape Games

 

 

 

 

 

Learning Disabilities Awareness Month

October is Learning Disabilities Awareness month! "While educators may have been taught that vision has nothing to do with learning, COVD is sending the message that vision has everything to do with learning." Check out the article below, you will really enjoy it. Pass it along to your friends and family.

Vision Problems Mistaken for Learning Disabilities: College of Optometrists in Vision Development Observes Learning Disabilities Awareness Month

More articles that I have blogged about that are related to Vision and Learning:

• How are Vision and Learning linked?
• Does your child have bad handwriting?
• My child gets vision screenings at school isn't that good enough?
• Teacher Resources

If you or your child struggles with "top 5 signs" you need to make an appointment with us or your local Optometrist. 

Nashville Vision Therapy
4322 Harding Pike, Suite 214
Nashville, TN 37203
ph. (615) 386-3086

It's a Brain Thing

Coming back from the seminar, I was filled with more knowledge and therapy procedures. I was excited to show my patients some new fun exercises. Today I am going to share some of my notes I  wrote down:

• Eye turn is not the problem- only a symptom.
• Eye turn is not an eye muscle problem- hence why surgery to correct an eye turn is just a cosmetic treatment. 
• Not an eye muscle problem- it is a brain thing
• 3-6 mounts of age is when eye teaming develops
• Eye turn is a binocular vision problem
• Goal in vision therapy is to make the patient a two eyed person
• 83% of the acuity goes back with just passive patching. Passive patching: just putting a patch over "strong eye" to use "weaker eye" for a number of hours without any stimulation. 
• Does your child have a constant head tilt? Head tilt to the left means your right eye is dominant. Head tilt to the right means you are left eye dominant.
• Head tilt compensates for what going on. It helps suppress other eye. 
• The eyes don't tell us what to see. The brain tells your eyes what to look for.
• Sue Barry- does Brock String exercise 5-10 minutes a day. Still!
• With Vision Therapy we try to develop a new neuro-pathway.
• If the visual system is not your child's dominant sense then they touch everything or are easily distracted. Who can relate with this?
• Call the "good/strong eye" the "teaching eye" and the "bad/weaker eye" the "learning eye".   

The is just a tidbit I took away from this past weeks seminar. I defiantly had a lot of "aha" moments. Have you learned anything new recently? Or have any "aha" moments? Share it!  Until next time! Have a great weekend. 

I'm ready to learn!

This weekend I am heading to Detroit for an Advance Vision Therapy Seminar. I will be learning more about Strabismus and Amblyopia. I am hoping to bring back more new VT tools and ideas to help my patients.

Let's talk about what Strabismus! Straight from the COVD website:

Strabismus or crossed eyes, is the inability to point both eyes in the same direction at the same time. One eye may appear to turn in (esotropia), out (exotropia), up (hypertropia), or down (hypotropia). The eye turn may occur constantly or only intermittently. Eye-turning may change from one eye to the other, and may only appear when a person is tired or has done a lot of reading. Strabismus may cause double vision. To avoid seeing double, vision in one eye may be ignored resulting in a lazy eye (amblyopia).


Crossed eyes most often develop in infants and young children, although it can occur in adults. This may also be caused by:

• Inadequate development of eye coordination in childhood
• Excessive farsightedness or differences between the vision in each eye
• Problems with the eye muscles that control eye movement
• Head trauma, stroke, or other general health problems

-----
To repeat, "to avoid seeing double, vision in one eye may be ignored resulting in a lazy eye (amblyopia)." What does that crazy looking word mean?


When the clarity or alignment of the images from the two eyes is very different, or if the child sees double, the brain may begin to ignore the vision in one eye. This can result in amblyopia. The favored eye compensates for the "lazy eye," so the child with amblyopia may not be aware of the problem until the better eye is covered.

Strabismus and Amblyopia are easily confused. But as you can see, there is a BIG difference between the two. I am excited to build more confidence and learn more fun exercises this weekend. Keep you posted! Have a great weekend, and I hope you do some learning this weekend too.

Vision Therapy Masking Tape Games

Happy September! Hope everyone had a great Labor Day weekend!

When you walk into our therapy room, you will always notice all the tape on the carpet. Here's another fun Vision Therapy game, with a little help from masking tape. It's easy, cheap, and effective!

Whose child is still reversing their b, d, p, q's? Here is a fun thing you can do:

Have your child stand in the middle and call out the letter you want them to hop to! FUN!

If you remember I blogged about balance and I used masking tape for the balance beam. Check it out here: Workin' the Vestibular System

For more ideas, visit What to Expect with a blog post titled "Indoor Family Activities- Just Add Masking Tape." These games work on a perceptual skills, balance, peripheral vision, and eye-hand coordination. That sounds like fun Vision Therapy to me!

Try these games out! I promise it will bring you lots of fun and it's easy clean up! Enjoy!

Treatment Tools

Meet Duke, an American Pit Bull Terrier. He is going to help us model each treatment lens we use here at Nashville Vision Therapy. Thanks, Duke!

To start us off, Duke is demonstrating his focusing abilities and anticipating a tracking exercises. He gets a little bored of just focusing and following a eyeball, so he decided to show us some fancy treatment tools our office uses during Vision Therapy.


Here we go...

Why is Duke wearing 4 lenses? Great question! These are called accommodative flippers. These lenses are used to improve the flexibility and strength of a patient’s focusing system. We use these with the Hart (letter) Chart, when reading, and when we use a tool called Aperture Rule. There are minus lenses on one side, and plus lenses on the other. The word "flipper" comes in handy because you flip the lenses back and forth while doing certain exercises to improve the focusing system.

Harry Potter is that you? No, it's just Duke wearing prisms! I could go on and on about prisms. We use them all the time, kids think they are so fun!  

"Prisms create total "eye-mind-body” changes and improved perception of depth and space.  Prism produces changes in orientation with corresponding shifts in both eye movement and pelvic positions. They are a valuable tool in breaking down patterns that have developed over time that enable the patient to cope with their visual condition." 

Here is a great article about prisms, which includes examples on how to use prisms in Vision Therapy exercises. Take a look: http://www.oepf.org/sites/default/files/22-5-FOX.pdf.


Duke circa 1970. These red/green (or can use red/blue lenses) lenses help us use both eyes together. Using these red/green lenses, allows us to see if a patient is suppressing the visual input from one eye.

When using these lenses we use a transparent film with red/ green stripes. We place this film over reading materials, hidden pictures, mazes, or letter charts. When doing the exercises you have to use both eyes enable to see the whole image. If you are not using both eyes, parts of the picture will be missing.


Each one of these tools helps the visual system work more efficiently. What do you think? Which lens have you used during therapy, and with what exercises? Have questions? Email us at VT@rdeyes.com.

Work that Peripheral Vision

Hello, readers. Happy Friday! If you remember, last week we talked about peripheral stability. As promised, here are some fun peripheral awareness exercises for home!
 
A couple of weeks ago I discussed building up the vestibular system. One of the exercises I mentioned was reading a letter chart while tossing a beanbag from your right to left hand and back again. This exercise is also great for your peripheral vision! Because you’re reading the letter chart, your central vision will be fixed straight ahead. This means that you will have to rely on your peripheral vision to get the beanbag back and forth. You can also use scarves (or a balloon) in place of beanbags to start, since the beanbags fall faster and will be more difficult.

Thanks to a fellow vision therapist, I have been doing a lot peripheral taps lately! They are a great easy home exercise. They note:

"Peripheral Taps
1.      Place your finger tips near your body facing the student
2.      Without taking their eyes off of you (I put a stick on my nose for children to focus on), have the student tap your fingers with his/her finger tips.
3.      Alternate hands and places around the face.”

Another awesome activity (that works on tracking AND peripheral vision) that I found is described in the following video. This activity would be easy to create at home, and is fun and engaging! Using regular flashlight is just fine.

As Dr. Julie mentioned when children or adults block out peripheral vision which then creates a tunnel vision effect it can cause loss of concentration and/or difficulty driving.

These are fun, easy home exercises to do at home that will greatly improve your peripheral vision. Try them out and let us know how it goes!

Peripheral Stability

Since Autism Awareness month was in April, I have been doing more research on how vision is affected by the diagnosis. As you might remember in this blog,"The goals of treatment may be to help the autistic patient organize visual space and gain peripheral stability so that he or she can better attend to and appreciate central vision and gain more efficient eye coordination and visual information processing."

The main phrase that stood out to me was "peripheral stability." I emailed some fellow Vision Therapist on ways I can incorporate more fun peripheral vision exercises into our treatment.  From there I looked for articles about peripheral vision and found an article by Dr. Gallop, titled "The Peripheral Visual Awareness: The Central Issue". The article had so much great information that I thought I would share a few tidbits that helped me a lot.

"Peripheral vision is the lion’s share of vision and, is also a big part of life. It is involved with detecting and understanding the big picture – the context and changes in our environment. At least visually speaking, it helps to keep us in touch with our relationship to everything with which we share visual space. Peripheral vision is at the heart of awareness of, and response to, the total space volume of our visual environment and all its inhabitants. Without the involvement and guidance of peripheral awareness the fovea would, for the most part, be “lost in space,” not knowing where to turn."

"This may also contribute to attention problems because without sufficient peripheral awareness, the context of visual space is lost and it becomes difficult to distinguish figure from ground. The environment becomes a series of unconnected, unrelated details to be dealt with one at a time – the background is practically non-existent."

"It is important to note that the real importance of peripheral awareness is not in the receiving of information as much as is it is in the response to that information. Knowing what is in our surroundings is important in the context of action for survival. While it is certainly important to know what is going on out there, it is equally important to know what needs to be done and how to go about doing it in response to what is going on out there. Peripheral vision provides an early warning system and is what guides our movements in response."

"Peripheral vision supplies us with information about our relationship to our surroundings. It tells us where we are in relation to people, places and things in our immediate vicinity. It can provide significant information about who they are, what they are doing, and how that may affect us at that moment and in the near future. When functioning comfortably and effectively it can provide accurate information regarding size, shape, direction of movement, and even intent."

"Just as improvements achieved through vision training often transfer into improvements in areas such as problem solving, concentration and self-esteem, improvements in peripheral processing may transfer into more so-called peripheral aspects of our lives."

Our peripheral vision is not something to mess around with. It is an important for our survival! Loved this article! Next week I will gather up some great peripheral vision awareness exercises that you can do at home. 

CNN article

One of my favorite news apps on my phone is the CNN app. I like the quick videos, and articles of the current events happening around the world. I will say, the "Distraction" videos on CNN are always a favorite. Like this one:



While reading some articles, I stumbled upon this: Man: 3-D movie changed my sight for the better. It is about a man who "had poor depth perception. His eyes pointed outward and did not allow him to see, in stereo, a single image with both eyes." One day he went to see Hugo in 3-D and "to his amazement, the characters and scenery in this film jumped out at him in greater stereo vision than he had experienced before." And even after the movie ended, "perception of the real world was enhanced as well. A lamppost jumped out from the background, and the trees, cars and people looked somehow more vivid."

Did the 3-D movie cure his poor depth perception and make his eyes point in the same direction? Read the rest of the article to see what happens! Stereo Sue makes an appearance in the article too!

It was a very interesting article, that I was so excited to read! Has anyone else found any great articles, that you were excited to see that related to Vision Therapy? Pass it along!

Have a happy 4th of July! 

Workin' the Vestibular System

Today's blog is about balance. As you might expect, our visual system play a big role. And when we work our visual systems, our balance/coordination gets better. For more information on that, check out this blog, and this blog.

How can we speed up the process (per se) and incorporate balance either in everyday things or with our Vision Therapy exercises? Lucky you, I am going to give you some fun ideas:

• Put a letter (or shape, picture, number, arrow) chart at eye level and walk heel toe, heel toe forward, and then backward. Basically, walk a straight line while reading a letter chart.

• Walk a straight line while tossing a bean bag (or ball or scarf) from right to left hand.  Take it to the next level and add a letter chart while doing all that!  
• Reading a letter (or shape, picture, number, arrow) chart while bouncing (not too high) on a mini-trampoline.
• While jumping on a mini-trampoline catch bean bags, and different sizes/types of balls. 

• Jump on the mini-trampoline to a beat. Metronomes work great! Crank it up a notch and add a letter chart. Read letters and jump to the beat. Whoa!
• When reading or doing homework, sit on an exercise ball. You will find, that (No. 1) it is very comfortable, (No. 2) helps your attention and (No. 3) works that vestibular system.
• Go to the play ground and use the balance beams. 
• Stand on one foot and read the letter chart. Alternate feet between every 5-10 lines. 
• Balance boards are a great tool: catch bean bags, catch/bounce balls, read the letter chart while balancing!
• Balance boards with an arrow chart: shift your weight on the balance board  in the direction the arrow tells you. Just like the video above! 

 

• Stand on the Balance board while hitting a balloon in the air. Don't let that balloon hit the ground! 
• Wii Fit balance board games!

How is that for fun, fun, fun!!! Give these a try and crank up that home therapy. Make it interactive, and be creative. Have any questions? Email me: VT@rdeyes.com